 Podcasters roundtable, round 162, is it a podcast or is this just live? So we've talked about live before here, but I am curious. There have been, you know, a couple new platforms have come on the scene probably since we've done that. So we'll, we will get into that. And I think one of our stories has something to do with that as well. But do you even care about live streaming as a podcast or do you do it? We are coincidentally doing a podcast right now that we are live streaming, right? So let's get into that. Let's talk to, or let's meet the roundtable. Co-host Dave Jackson, welcome back. Ray, thanks for having me. Yeah, this is very meta. It's a live stream about a podcast where we're going to talk about is live streaming a podcast. So I'm looking forward to it. Well, you know, we don't, we don't do topics anymore. So we're not going to talk much about it. Although whatever that first story is tends to go the first half. So if you're the lucky story who goes first, then you get a lot of play. That's it. But yes, Dave Jackson School of Podcasting.com. Awesome. And brand new roundtabler, John, welcome to your first roundtable. Thanks, Ray. Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me. John Chiggy, I sort of run the engineered network. It's a network, but it isn't. I mainly just a place to put on my shows because I have too many podcasts, like so many podcasters. Too many. He listens to Ray. Yes, anyhow. But yes, most known for causality and pragmatic podcasts. So, but yes, thanks for having me on guys. Been looking forward to this for quite a while. So thank you. Awesome. And I think that John probably reached out to remind me that he was on the list, which is very helpful. So podcastersroundtable.com slash guest. If you want to be on a future roundtable, and that's where we pull from, to get roundtablers most of the time. Sometimes I have to go out and recruit, depending on what we are talking about. So we want to have as much expertise as possible, but you do not have to be an expert to be on the roundtable. The whole key to this show is that it is different perspectives from different podcasters at different stages in their podcast journey, right? So not every podcaster, most do not have a show about podcasting, but every podcaster knows a lot about their experience podcasting. That's what we want this audience to learn from. So join us and podcastersroundtable.com slash live is where we're doing this. And of course we're on YouTube. So if you want to see, if you're just listening to this, which most of you will be, audio podcast, they won. They beat out the video podcast. YouTube killed the video podcast star and we're on YouTube. So we give in, check us out on YouTube. Also podcastersroundtable. So I am having a frosty beverage made of beer, which I invite everyone to do, but it is BYOB bringing on beverage, but it is like 9.30 in the morning, wherever John is. So John, where are you coming from? I'm in Brisbane, Australia. So on the East coast of Australia. So yeah, it's a beautiful Saturday morning. Really literally is a lovely morning out there, but so I'll be sticking to water for this one, but that's totally fine too. Yes, that's what I'm doing. We are keeping the international thing going Dave. We have very successful rate of international contributors here, which I really enjoy and it's rarely ever intentional. It makes it sound so much smarter. That's the thing I love about it. The accents, they help. That's it. All right, well, you know what? Stories, I think John is the winner with two on here. We're thin on stories. Is it possible that we have the shortest roundtable ever? Don't count on it, but John, we have the chance to have a short roundtable, but who wants that? We're gonna be gone for weeks. Let's just drag this out. Maybe we can break it up into part four. You guys like doing podcasts as parts? So here, before we get to the first story, I'm already jumping off the tracks. Podcasts as parts, right? You've seen that. I swear, I've done it actually in the podcast or studio had like an epically long conversation. And early on you think, oh, maybe it's a good idea to break this into part one and part two. I don't know, maybe it is. There's arguments for and against. John, have you ever done that with the show, the episode? I actually have. And the episode I had was episode 82 of Pragmatic. It was about Tesla and I had Caleb Elston on from the Tesla show. And we talked for four hours straight. And out of I think respect for my listeners, I figured that's just way too long to stay on that topic. So I had to split it into two episodes. And it was interesting because I got a bit of a 50-50 split of people coming back saying, why'd you cut that off? I could listen to that all in one go and so on. But as many people also thank me. So I'm not entirely sure what the conclusion is on that is I think you can do it. I think it was the right call, but I got mixed messages from my audience. So I'm not entirely sold, which was the better approach in the end. But yeah, I still stand by what I did though, in that case. Plant the flag, I stand by it. But Dave, what do you think about this? Because I think it's up in the air, it's a tough one. I think in four hours, that's definitely something you're gonna think about. What I hate is when somebody has a show that's normally, I don't know, a half hour and they talk to somebody for an hour and then they break it into three 20-minute segments because in addition to the 20-minute segments, you then have them reintroducing the guest again and then doing their little snippet at the end where they're gonna do their Jerry Springer what we learned today. And I was like, if you would cut out all those introductions and what I learned today that really wouldn't have been that long of an interview. That's where I kind of go, I'm gonna vote, give it to me all in one shot. There's always the Dan Carlin Hardcore history, but let's face it, Dan is a freak and creates incredible content. So when he's doing six-hour shows, it's, you know, but I'm trying to think that the only time I hate it is if a segment can't stand on its own. So if they're like, they get to the crescendo and they're like, hey, if you wanna hear how this ends, tune in again next week, kids, you know, and you're like, ah, you know, so. And then of course, there's always the Valerie Geller. There is no such thing as too long, only too boring line, but I don't know, four hours. I think it depends on your audience. I always go back to, Judy Graff did a show called Farman Wife. Her first episode was three hours and she gave it to me to kind of give it the one so. And I go, Judy, this is three hours long. And she goes, yeah, I know my audience is saying it's too short. And I was like, what? And she goes, yeah, she goes, my audience is farmers. And when you see those guys out there and they're going down these big giant rows and they're planting seed or whatever they're doing, she's like, a lot of those tractors drive themself. That's why the rows are so straight. She goes, the guy that's actually driving is just sitting there to do the turns. She's like, so they're bored out of their gourd. And so they were sitting there listening to the podcast and they're like, hey, that was cool. Do you got another one? So, which I guess means the proverbial podcast answer, which is of course, it depends. So I think if you're thinking about it, cause I would say my most successful episode, I mean, I don't, it's not science. I'm guessing on the round table, I'm not the round table. I don't know about, did we ever, did we, I think, did we do a part one, part two? I don't think so. I don't think so. We did that presentation that we did at whatever conference we were at with me, you and Daniel. I feel like there was a part, there was a part two, I think anyways, on the podcast or studio was like some epically long conversation with an audio engineer about compression and people loved it. And I know personally, as I'm listening, if the conversation's good and you pull the plug, oh man, especially if you probably should serve your most hardcore listeners, right? Your regular subscribers, because think about what happens when you do, they're in, they're probably in, right? John, as you said it, like some people said, I could have kept listening to that, right? And those are the people who are gonna keep coming back. And so when you do that, those people listen when the podcast comes out. So when you say part two's coming up, they really do have to wait like a full week for part two, as opposed to a lot of people will catch it in the archive and it doesn't matter, it can go right to part two. It's tough. And so I think probably having a communication with your audience is probably best on this. And I'm sure some shows do this intentionally. I mean, honestly, there's like a, when I talk to my podcasters at work, what I try to get them to do is shorten the episode as opposed to like before we go in, right? And have a plan and don't, cause you could do four hours or even like the same two hours and at the end of an hour, you're on topic three, but three and topic three and four were amazing content. A lot of times probably didn't get heard. Obviously you can see this in your retention stats, right? At least we have those now. That wasn't always a thing, right? Dave, we didn't always know like when people were dropping off unless they told us, now you can see it. I mean, if you're losing the majority of your audience at 45 minutes or something, you kind of found out where you should be. And maybe that tells you if you're doing to do, you know, an hour and 45 minutes you should split in two, right? And then check those metrics. I think that's probably pretty good. And look, we're podcasters, we're making up as we go, all our audiences are different. So iterate, like figure it out and then change, I would say. Yeah, I was interviewed on a show this week and they had me booked from 7.30 to 9.30. And I emailed them, I go, is this really like two hours? And they're like, yeah. And I was like, okay, I'll try to be entertaining for two hours, that's a long time to like, hello my babies, yeah. So consider those, okay, let's throw those into it. You've got, if you're gonna do interviews, right? Like you should probably not, especially ahead of time. That person should know what they're signing up for really early, maybe in the first request. Hey, I'd like to do an interview with you, it's two hours long. So you could at least say, yeah, I can't really do two hours, right? And it's just not gonna work. I can do an hour or whatever, right? And then there's today's topic, live streaming. We are live and this is the only time you hear me say, because I absolutely despise when I hear podcasters say, well, we're gonna need to wrap it up. We're about out of time. What time? What time are you out of? You're a podcaster. I agree, right? But in this scenario, you will hear me say that because I've asked an audience to be here. The expectation is that we're gonna run an hour and someone puts that into their schedule. And if I'm over an hour, they still wanna listen, but they've already planned to do something else. So in that case, when it's live, and it's kind of like, we might talk more about what's the difference between live and a podcast. I think there's a different consideration there for the audience. John, what do you think about all of these or any other factors that go into deciding? Well, okay, so just holding on the interview one for a second, I'll just wanna circle back quickly that all this conversation jogged my memory on the Tesla episode, I actually decided to release a merged, as originally recorded version for my patrons on Patreon. So I actually did do that. It's like a DVD bonus. Like he threw it back to the DVD bonus, God. Yeah, exactly. So as you were saying, it's like for the committed fans, the people that are really supporting the show, then I don't wanna make them wait. So in the end, I actually did that. This was a few years ago, so I just blanked on that temporarily. So there's that. So I agree with that one for sure. On the interviewing side, I like what you were talking about, Dave, you had like a two hour block. I try and do the same thing when I'm interviewed because I say interviewing, I have people on pragmatic. It's not really an interview, it's just a conversation with someone who's more of an expert on the topic and we just like compare notes and so on. But I'd always set that expectation up front and I always ask for what's the end stop. The whole four hour thing was just a freak occurrence that we just kept talking and talking. It was great conversation. So I didn't wanna stop. And lucky for me, Nordic Caleb, so it was great, fond memories of just recording that episode was fun. And you shouldn't stop because as a listener, I can tell when that happens, right? Again, with the time limits, or I can tell even more so when an interviewer doesn't pay attention to the question. I'm like, how are you not following up with that amazing thing they just said? They're going to the next question on their list. Like let the interview go where it's going to go. But you can tell when the interviewer's pulling the plug and you're like, it was so good. So what are you doing? You just had the best interview with this person and you just let it go. Anyways, John, keep going. Oh, no, just simply, I didn't have too much else to add on that point. It's just that I always look at it this way. When I've got someone else's time, I have to respect their time limits. And I say to them, as soon as we dial it, has anything changed? Do you have a hard stop? Let's talk about that straight up front. And if I have to reprioritize the content and if there's questions or points we wanna cover, then that's what I gotta do in real time. And that's just the way it goes. And it's painful when you gotta pull the plug because they have to go. I'll always allow extra time, but if I've got someone on who's really busy and getting their time is precious, so I have to respect their time and it doesn't always work out. So it's painful when they gotta leave. And it's a really good conversation. And I'm like, okay, well, thank you. Well, in the same way that podcasters remember their one star review, I remember the podcast going back to race thing. Somebody was interviewing Liz Covert, who does Ben Franklin's world. And she was going over the history of radio and how it's changed. And you start to see similarities between podcasting and radio. And the host was like, well, we're out of time. And I was like, it's a pod. I'm like screaming at my dashboard. It's a podcast. It's not like the midday person is coming in and we gotta go for Kenny the kid or something. I was like, ah, you're killing me. And they're like, oh, we'll have her back. And then they never did. Is Kenny the kid, a character, Dave, that I missed? Kenny the kid is actually a guy that was a DJ in Cleveland, was really good. Like so good that I would like set my alarm 730 on Saturday nights. And of course, and here's what he did. You ready for this? He let people pick the songs. Like it was actually a request. It was from 730 to midnight. And it was so good that you guessed it, Radio Candom. I was gonna say, you know what? As a kid, I always called in for the request. And then I was just convinced that they took the request that were already on the list. Like it wasn't actually a request. Yeah. I once requested Judas Priest and they're like, yeah, we're not gonna play that. But if you request Loverboy, we'll play that. And I was like, hey, Rock and Rick, can I hear some Loverboy? And they're like, working for the weekend. I was like, wow, okay, that's how that works. So I mean, let's admit it as podcasters. Most of us were just the kid who was recording, waiting to hear us request the song so we can hit the two button, record and play. That's it. I'm gonna name my band, record and play. This is like, or my clothes backwards. That's an old joke. All right, I just made it up. Let's see. Liberty Dude says, your podcast is your art and extension of you. Create your vision. If feedback makes sense, use it. If not, don't, art will never please ever. Everyone don't try. And I would say definitely because you know, I'm talking about, you know, ask your audience and get that feedback but there will be the squeaky wheel, right? And you have to keep the silent majority in mind, right? So take everything with a grain of salt, evaluate the feedback. Does it make sense for the show, right? It's sure people are going to have, yeah. Because if somebody goes, hey, I want you to go in this direction. And you go, yeah, that's not really why I'm doing the podcast. There's a name for that person. And then it is not your target audience. Like, I appreciate you listening but that's not what we do here. Thank you. All right. It's really hard to do when you're trying to figure out what your audience wants. The longer you do it and the better you get to know your audience, the better you get at it. But when I started out, I did try a little bit everything, including live streaming, which we're going to get to in a second as we live stream. Sorry, I just love that. Anyway, never mind. The point is that it's difficult because I've fallen into the squeaky wheel syndrome myself and learned some hard lessons along the way. So. I almost canceled it. Dave was talking about. Yeah. I remember mine is a bad commercial for a bad show. One star. I was like, I can quote that like it's scripture but tell me to ask me to quote a five star couldn't do it. But no, I had a woman complain about my podcast rodeo show and I almost shut the whole thing down. And then I asked my audience and they're like, what are you talking about? No, this is, because I was like, sometimes I come across as kind of mean and they're like, no, no, no, keep doing it. That's just one like, don't pay no attention to the person crying behind the screen. It's like, she's fine. I was like, okay. So don't let that squeaky wheel be, you know, too. It may be loud, but there may, you need to check it for accuracy or like I said, in some cases, that's not your target audience. I think that, you know, you can't quote the five star reviews because I think those come in and they're more like, they're more like size of relief. You're like, oh, all right. People are enjoying it, right? As opposed to that one person who doesn't enjoy it. And also the comments usually bad too, because it's just like you suck. You're like, oh, I remember that. The nice review goes way into why they like it, which is the one you need to read and filter into your show and do more of. Like hopefully you've done that, right? But I mean, yeah, shout out those when they come in, shout those out. Like those are big, those are big. Someone gives you their time to do that. And I mean, as a podcaster with Paul probably read a review that was nice. And it's like, okay, I'm reaching people. This is working. This feels better than the bad stuff. And save them. If they came in like as an email, save, make a folder or something somewhere to save those. So on those days when you're like, time to make the podcast, like hold on, let's go read some of these and put some gas back in my tank. I would honestly say the only reason this show keeps going is because sometimes it's a, you know, we're not here every two weeks, but sometimes. And when I'm able to show back up and then the guests come on and to meet new people, new experience, every time we end, I'm like, ah, that's the reason that pulls me back in every time. So the audience keeps it going, 100%. All right, let's get into one of the stories, John. Now that let's put the train back on the track. There is no track here, by the way, it's the round table, but we'll try. All right. So I picked this one. It was like, wherever you get your podcasts, it was on Amplify Media, I got the link from Podcast Business Journal. And it talks a bit about the different platforms and platform providers and different missteps that they've taken and how lots of little apps that have had lots of VC money poured into them just haven't taken off. They haven't succeeded in the longer term and does a very light touch analysis on like exactly why they said that was the case. But for me, there were two takeaways, the sub takeaway which relates to the live streaming was that TuneIn tended to favor live audio. And I personally didn't understand the attraction of that, but that was cited as one of the reasons why they weren't successful. And then they talked about different ones like podcast, sorry, podcast, sorry, and how it's been bounced across from NPR to automatic, I think it is. And some of the other ones that have had lots of VC funding just haven't gone anywhere. And my observation was that ultimately platform, larger platform providers like Spotify and Apple are tending to succeed. I would probably count YouTube because that's kind of like a balance and maybe even TikTok maybe as well, but that's sort of fringe if we're coming at this from the traditional podcasting angle which is predominantly audio first. So as audio first, I think the larger platform play just seems to be the one that is ultimately more sustainable. And a lot of these other ones are just falling by the wayside. I see apps that are solving problems that don't exist. Like, oh, here's, you know, this one, blah, blah, blah. Like I just heard where another, there's another app that's coming out that's small snippets of audio. And I was like, do we not remember that like that's how Anchor started? It was little like 15 seconds and you know, TikTok now has gone to 10 minutes. I was like, how many times are we gonna start off with a small snippet of something? And then it goes up and blah, blah, blah. Like I know, I think Bullhorn is still around. And I know there's a feature that is different than any other app but I couldn't tell you what it is. It's probably something to do with feedback or something like that with a name like Bullhorn. But I know they're around, they're probably VC funded but you know, it's, you have to, for me, I use Overcast. And the only thing that I have remotely ever thought about leaving Overcast for is Marco has come out and said, I'm not doing streaming Satoshis. I'm not doing the whole Bitcoin thing. Not gonna do it. And I was like, that's a bummer because that's the one feature. Like I always tell people that are making those kind of apps where you know, the new podcastapps.com I'm like, can you just make Overcast? Can you just recreate this? And some of them are getting close and when they get close and they streamed then I'll be like, okay, there's the one feature I need that this app doesn't do that I now wanna do over here. But that's, and streaming Bitcoin is such a small percentage of people that even wanna do that. But I think sometimes people make apps that are like, oh, this one allows you to do such and such. And I'm like, is anybody wanting that? You know, so. I think you're right about tune in. In that case, it was pretty, that the live audio was the brand. Like you understood, I think if you understood what tune in was you kind of understood that. It kind of felt like radio for podcasters, for producers in the early days it was the way to get in on, what was it? Like the Echo or something like that. Yeah. Early, what it'll do today. And I'm a lifetime podcast user. Absolutely love it. And the reason, I'm trying to remember why I went there in the first place but it had the best UI early on. And so it hooked me early and I think people tend to stick with the one that they find and is good enough. But it makes me wonder how much of it is, you know, sort of network effect and being early, right? So Apple obviously like the first major podcast directory, right? To really have like that network effect, that massive audience that's already there. So that's naturally why people go there. And then they sort of stay there. People don't like change. They don't move that often. Spotify, you know, maybe think, if you're trying to compete with Google today, could you do it, right? So I started using Brave browser recently for, I just need another browser. And I like it, but it, you know, I think Brave browser is all about security and the crypto plays into that a little bit too. So they're trying to find their niche, right? Cause going, becoming something bigger than Google or even Safari or Firefox at this point is pretty, pretty hard. Now you could say, oh, Spotify came along late. They busted in their number two, which that number two has kind of always been up for the taking weirdly, it's just been sitting there. We remember the Zoom, Microsoft had, they had the chance to just lock that in. The number two was locked in by Zoom and then they, you know, rip on RIP Zoom. So, or Zoom, gotta be careful these days. Zoom is so synonymous, but how did they do it? Again, they already had such a massive built-in audience. And then they threw a lot of money at it. And I'm not even sure if it's been worth it to them at this point, but maybe it pays off, maybe it will pay off, I don't know. So it's tough, it's tough to climb that hill. Yeah, I would say if I was launching a new app, yeah, you can go to podcast movement and podcast, but I would like go to different cities and I don't know, go to the library and do a how to listen to podcasts, you know, 30 minute presentation and show people how to use my app because when you go to a current listener, you're asking them to leave something where they've already got playlists set up and their speeds and everything else that they've totally configured this to them. And now like, oh, I gotta go over here and refind all my shows. I would go after people that aren't listening to podcasts yet. And then because then when they learn on that new app, that's not the app that you're gonna have to pry from their cold dead hands because they like, I've been using this for years. So I just remember tuning in back before I had one of these. Yes, kids, this is a radio. It's an actual radio. I thought it was a Zoom, I thought it was a Zoom. There's a Zoom back there, isn't there? I like the brown one, I want a brown one. You don't have a Zoom, Dave? I do not have a Zoom. I'd have to go. Rio MP3 player. I probably do somewhere. Yeah. Still rubs. Yeah, that's it. But I wouldn't listen to, because tuning had sports. They had like baseball or something like that. I remember once for whatever reason the game was blacked out or something like that. I was like, I wonder if I can listen to this on tuning and I was. So I was like, well, that's kind of cool. But other than that, I haven't, it's not an app I frequent on a regular basis if at all. I mentioned overtaking Google, but what about Google jumping in and overtaking Spotify? Apple, right? John, you mentioned YouTube, right? And we've kind of all been sitting around waiting for YouTube to do something else with podcasts or for Google to open up hosting, right? They host video. They won the video game. I said that they killed the video podcast star because they won video. There were video podcasts you had to upload. You had to host them. It's still too expensive to host video podcast. Like for, we're not hosting this show or like an hour long, right? You could do who has an eight minute podcast anymore. In the days, early days, there were great like eight to 10 minute video podcasts. It's kind of what they were, right? Cause you had like geek brief and Tiki bar TV and the news, the rocket news. You had all that stuff that was short format, but now most podcasts are long format. And to host that on video, and there also used to be a bunch of free platforms and you can't, people always say, oh, well you host on YouTube and then you put that in a podcast, but you don't have access to the MP4 and all that stuff, right? So yeah, could YouTube do this? Will they do this? Is it, you know, I don't know. What do you think John? You kind of accounted it. I actually think that YouTube could do it, but I'm not entirely sure they're going to because I think that their branding is, well, you know, we're a video platform first and they just want to, I think it's more convenient for them to rebrand what a podcast is and say, well, a podcast can have video too and we got all the podcasts and it's like, yeah, but it's not really audio. So if I have to look at a screen, I can't listen to it when I'm doing something with my eyes, you know, like I should be watching the road when I'm driving, you know, just the thought. But, you know, I think that they definitely have the capacity to do it. On the subject of video podcast, by the way, I tried an experiment about four months ago, I had my Christmas holidays, I'm like, you know, I'm going to do something different, which is whenever I say that, always get worried. But I got a, what is it, a, not a GoPro, it was a DJI Osmo, whatever, secondhand action cam anyway. And I connected it to the car and did a couple of little, you know, driving sort of videos related to electric cars and so on. And I've done five episodes of it and I hosted that myself on my server. I've got like, you know, two and a half terabytes of upload bandwidth and, you know, I'm a geek and I own every layer of the stack because I'm a geek, I'm not your regular, you know, anyway, it doesn't matter. My point is that I posted that and it was sort of, if it ever took off, it would kill my server. So I'm actually banking on it, not taking off, which sounds odd. It was a bit of fun, a bit of an experiment, but it does not scale. So I can absolutely see why YouTube won. It's, yeah, they have, but whether or not they can redefine what a podcast is remains to be seen, I think. I mean, I think they almost broke themselves trying. Like, YouTube didn't make money forever from what I understand. They lost money, hand over fist for like, of many, many years of its existence. And I mean, kudos to them. They saw the long game, I guess. And now they're practically what TV is. I mean, they're practically what music is. I mean, Spotify is committing with YouTube, but kids, it's free people. When you wanna hear music, I even go to YouTube and like, I wanna hear that song, I'll put it on YouTube because I know it's there, right? I know I can get it with nothing in between. Now you talked about being able to, you know, they have the premium subscription which lets you listen without watching. You can even close the app, not close the app, but minimize the app, do other stuff. So if you're in your car, there's just something about like, if there is a video player there, there's some type of barrier. Like we feel like we're, it just feels wrong. Like, oh, you just have an image and audio, but if you just give me no image, just audio, that feels more like a podcast app. I don't know. Yeah, YouTube is, it's funny because we talked about, there was some research done fairly recently that asked people where they listened to podcasts. Just opened in it. And I think YouTube was right at the very top, right? Because people who listen don't, they don't split it up, right? They don't define what a podcast is. They just know there's a podcast. They like that's on YouTube. You know, and that begs the question like, are you on YouTube? Should you be on YouTube? How are you on YouTube? All of that stuff, which we've talked about plenty of times. Well, and YouTube is coming to podcast movement. Is it Evolutions or the one in Dallas? But YouTube is coming. Yeah, they're talking. So we're all kind of like, oh, because that's next week. And we're all like, what are they gonna say? Like it's all like, okay, well now you got my attention. Oh, they're speaking or they just come? They've always lurked a guarantee of all the comments we've been in. I believe somebody is coming and they're speaking. So that's when we all went, oh, because hey, first they're there. I remember when they launched Google podcast about whatever, probably two or three years ago, they were there and it's cool because they had a booth. Like you could talk to somebody from Google and they were explaining how, you know, they were gonna make podcasting bigger than ever. Yeah, it was Zach and a couple other people. Because I remember the one guy was, I had his car. We had a guy for a while. We had a guy. Like we could tweet him. It was amazing. And, you know, I know it's hard to believe, but it seems like Google has retired that, not that they ever, you know, killed things. That's what they do. I was gonna bring that up. Don't forget that Google has tried and tried and tried at the podcasting thing and they give up on it, right? Whether it's helping, whether it's Feedburner or it's, what was the first iteration of Google podcast? It was like, there was something. Google, listen. Yes, Google, listen. They've tried. And then, yeah. And it's not really podcasting, but they had Google Plus, was their answer to Facebook. Social, yeah. Yeah. But so, you know, and if you listen to James Cridlin, he's kind of mentioned that we all know Zach has gone into some place else and there was somebody over there. Metapole, I believe. Oh, that's funny. And if you listen to James, James is kind of like, I'm not sure who's running the ship at Google podcast. And it's like, it's a bummer because, I mean, they're number three now. So it's like, well, you're not even trying, right? Yeah. That's what I mean. Two was up for grabs because no one was trying. Yeah. That's unfair to apps that are giving it a hard go, but I feel like it was there for one of these bigger companies to just be like, we're going to own at least the second spot, right? Right. So it feels like they could own it now. Spotify has come on very strong. So they probably haven't. And of course, their strategy is to make announcements that sound phenomenal and then just don't deliver on them. Those are costly announcements they're making. Yeah. Yeah. It's costly announcements. That's true. Awesome. John, any more to add on this one? Any more thoughts? I don't think so. I think that it's ground that we sort of covered a few times. Well, I should say you guys have covered several times on the show. And I do think that the next big players in podcasting are going to come from non-traditional podcasting areas like YouTube, like TikTok. And I think that that's sort of inevitable because of the scale you need to be operating at to actually offer some kind of competition. And I mean, Spotify just keep on throwing money at the problem and bring in more and more platforms and people and so on. That's their play. They want it to be, they want to be the one stop shop for your ears. Essentially, you want to listen to audio. They got what you need kind of thing. And YouTube in many respects is trying the same kind of thing. They're just coming out from a different angle. So it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out in the next couple of years. How does that affect us? The producers, even listeners, like how do you think, especially producers, right? If you're listening to this show, you probably make a podcast. So I don't know, do you guys try, is this just a part of be everywhere? Like if there's an offer to, if there's a platform who says they're putting podcasts on it. Because here's the thing too, right? YouTube is not a podcast platform. So it's not as easy to just be there, right? Because you can't just put your RSS feed and they take it, right? And so now another distribution point for us as a podcaster. Now, Dave, you work at Lipson. They have a tool that will do this over to YouTube, but not all do. And I bet not a lot of people. I bet that most people don't use that and I don't know why. And I'm totally guessing maybe Dave, you know better. But as producers of podcasts, like I guess what I'm asking you guys, is it, do you see new platform, go to new platform? Or, you know, you said TikTok and I'm like, that makes me think I got to do something else, which I'm just not going to do. So I'm making a choice of audience versus workflow. Right? Bandwit. Yeah, I know. I heard Mark from Captivate mention about some platform. I want to say it was in Africa. Like, you know, in the same way that Deezer is kind of the Pandora of Europe and Ghana is the super popular audio thing in India. There's one in Africa that apparently is, you know, coming down the pike. So, but that again is taking an app with a built-in audience and just, you know, kind of shoe-horning in podcasting. Do you, I mean, as a producer though, do you look for new platforms or do you just? I do. That's one of my things that I scratch my head on because when I see somebody that goes, oh yeah, I'm only in Spotify and Apple. And I was like, I get a couple hundred downloads from Ghana. Those people speak English and, you know, they might know somebody who knows somebody who wants something that I offer. So, and it's free. That's the other one that I go. It takes maybe a minute and a half to set yourself up on a platform. You do it once and then you're done. And it's not like it's going to hurt your show in any way. It's like, well, everything was doing great until I got more exposure in another country. I don't understand that. So that's the one that always, I just scratch my head because they're like, well, I was thinking about using this one and maybe this one and that one. And I'm like, why would you not just list your show everywhere? Because, you know, you never know who's listed. Yeah. I have percent agree, a hundred percent agree. And I think that the first time I heard it was Dan Benjamin on five by five saying, you know, be everywhere. He said, if I have a podcast, I want everyone to be able to listen to it from any platform that they want to. So I kind of look at it as there's two categories of those platforms. Ones that, like you say, Dave, point to the RSS feed, you know, claim your podcast, whatever. And then it'll automatically suck it up the next time you publish a new episode in your RSS feed. And it's kind of like, it's 10, 15 minutes of your time and then it's done one and done kind of thing. You don't have to lift a finger. And then the other category as well, now I've got an extra step. And the extra step is an example like YouTube and wet point is, well, they aren't going to do that. You have to encode the video. If you're on a platform like Livson, you know, for example, they'll export, you can have an export option, which I actually did do on causality for quite some time. I was skeptical, but it was actually low effort on my part. So, you know, thumbs up to Livson for offering that. And then when I eventually turned that off for a myriad of reasons, I decided, you know what, I can actually just do that because I had it in ferrite on my iPad. So I export that as a video and I upload it manually. So, but the funny thing is that the more I do this from time to time now, I've sort of looked at this between premium content, which is like ad-free and so on that I make in a high bitrate, high quality format that I offer for premium subscribers and the public available stuff as well as the video stuff. My list of destinations, I've got a checklist that's like this long of things I've got to upload too, which it gets to be a bit of a hassle. But on the YouTube front, I do believe it is a destination that you do need to be in, even if it is just like my chapter artwork encoded against the audio. I know that some people, I've had feedback from people saying, oh, you know, this isn't really a video, why is it on here? And I've other people that have discovered the show and it's usually based on things like anniversaries of different things. So I do, causality looks at cause and effect of disasters and incidents in history. And Ocean Ranger had its 40th anniversary of that incident a few weeks ago. And then that particular video was hovering around 150 views. It's now over 8,000 views. And it's like, and some of those people made list, start listening to, you know, the podcasts and so on, broader beyond that, you know, bringing in new listeners. I think you do have to be everywhere, even if it's not an ideal experience. It ties in real nicely to the squeaky wheel. As one person said, why you on here doesn't make sense. And then you have a segment that is discovering your show, the actual healthy engagement. You know, that no one's helping you by telling you go away, right? So that's a troll, ignore the trolls, like listen to the people or, you know, obviously if people are discovering you that wouldn't have discovered you before, that's a win, right? And then there was always this question of mixing in that type of content with a quote unquote regular YouTube channel. I wouldn't do that. I've done that. I keep going back to video podcasting, because if you don't know, my first podcast was a video podcast. But you remind me of the days when, as video podcasters, we had to manually upload to like 20 sites. And then there was a service called, I don't remember what it was called, which is crazy now, feels crazy, that would finally do it for you. And that was amazing. But then you always had to check and it was a mess. And so, yeah, good days. But that is a perfect segue into, you know, you talked about platforms that are not, I would say podcast focused or podcast centric in that they take your RSS feed. However, there are podcasts on them, right? I mean, we talk about promotion all the time. And if you want to be on Instagram, you got to make some art and put some audio to it, you know, do different things. These are all things that add to the limited time that most podcasters have. And it's like, do you or don't you? Is it worth it? Live streaming, right? I mean, that goes right into live streaming. And I put on our list that I want to talk about Twitter Spaces because that's sort of the newest thing that I've seen that is podcast like, but is not. And it's live. If you haven't joined a Twitter space, if you're on Twitter, you'll see someone's avatar just have a glowing circle around it and it's live. It's just live streaming, but it's a live conversation. We've seen this multiple times. Was Meerkat, I still have the t-shirt. Was Meerkat video? I think it was video too. But audio only streaming is not like a thing we've seen too much of, if I'm recalling. But I've tuned into several Twitter spaces recently. A niche that I've recently started following is very Twitter space centric and honestly they're horrible. They're horrible. But the thing is that it's horrible in the worst way because guess what? I want the information. Getting to it is a, oh, it's just annoying. So between the bad audio quality, which you know, not most people, a lot of people aren't going to recognize or care about me. I don't know. You'll certainly see podcast reviews that say your audio is terrible. I can't listen to this anymore. So you should pay attention to that. It is literally the one instrument you have when you're an audio podcaster. Put some investment into your time there or time into your investment, whatever. So between that, but I mean, inevitably, right? What does everyone do when they start a live stream? Well, we'll give people five, ten minutes to roll in here and we'll just wait. What are you doing? What are you doing? So fortunately, I would say most of these are recorded. They're not all recorded. It's an option. So like I can go back and scrub through this stuff, but it's just bad and it makes me think of podcasts. What's the difference? And so I would not call this live streaming because it is just like, it sort of is. You sort of have the people who are on stage and they can invite other people on stage. I don't know. Have you guys checked out Twitter Spaces? I am thinking about doing it now tomorrow. But you'll do it. You'll do it well because you're coming from it as a producer of a show. So right. Twitter Spaces is just like where people aren't. How do you start? How do you start a Twitter space? I assume from the app. I've never done it. Yeah. Okay. So I actually tried it just for a heck of a, about a four or five months ago. It's only been available in Australia since for about a year. And I just squeaked in above the requirements. The cutoff is like 600 followers. Like a like 630 something on Twitter. I haven't really been super active on Twitter for the last four or five years. There's a lot of negativity out there. And that's sort of the platform itself makes me like, gosh, it just triggers me. And maybe that's the whole algorithm. That's the point of the algorithm. We want to be triggered. I don't really feel like being triggered right now. Anyway. So, so I just fired it up just for the heck of it. And I had one person joined. They didn't actually say anything. And it was pretty much 20 minutes of nothing. And it's like, well, I suppose I thought, well, is that Twitter Spaces fault? Or is this, I just don't have enough followers that are interested that know what they're looking for. It was still early days. So it may be a different story now. I joined a couple of other Twitter Spaces and funny thing is Ray, what you just described is exactly what happened. They're like, well, we're just going to wait a few more minutes for a few more people to join. And I'm like looking at my watch and I'm like, I don't have a few more minutes. I'm just, I'm out by thanks. This was a waste of my time. It was frustrating. I did not enjoy one. I mean live streaming. We've often talked about Dave as that it's like, it's like bonus content almost, right? It's for your hardest core user. And when you say we're starting at four, like that's when the content should be there, right? It's not, we're going to start gathering. It's not a cocktail party. Like is there not going to mingle first? Like I came here with intention. And as, as a person who is producing something, the hardest thing you can get is to do is, well, get someone to send you email or feedback. Then it's to show up to your live stream very hard. Right? That's why time shifted content is so successful because it's on someone else's schedule. Um, so if someone shows up to your live performance, what we're doing here, you know, try to start on time, but we get to the content and we understand this as show makers. Right. Why was wonder like at their job, is their boss like showing up at 8 a.m. And he's like, ah, let's see if anybody shows up today. Like no, you show up at work on time. So obviously you have the skills to show up and perform at a certain time. But if it's a webinar, it's like, hey, where's everybody from? Oh, look, Poughkeepsie. Good. Oh, all right. Cincinnati's in the house. Oh, Texas, Texas. It's hot there. Yes. I'm like, it's so boring. And then if that's not bad enough, when you then post it later, you do not edit it out. Right. So now I have to fast forward through. Oh, London's in the house. Look at that. Oh, wow, Brisbane. You know, it's like, OK, you know, that drives me nuts. Matique here says the clubhouse was just as ridiculous. So Twitter's basis felt like an answer to clubhouse. Like clubhouse was stealing, not stealing, but they were getting a lot of attention, a lot of attention. Like it was part of the scarcity model because early on you couldn't get in. Like unless you were like specially invited or something, something ridiculous like that. And when that when that ran out, so did clubhouse. I don't know. It's probably still a thing. There's probably still a community there. But he said it started out fresh and exciting and quickly devolved into something boring and horrible, which is what I feel like most of these turned into. Now you could say, you could say the same thing about podcasts. Like in terms of anchor opened up, you got a bunch of trash in there because it was low effort content. And that, you know, I'm always torn between did that help or her podcasting, right? Because of like, it got people in, it got in, it got in words and voices that wouldn't have been heard, but it also turned a lot of people off because they couldn't weed through the garbage, right? So same thing with Twitter Spaces. These things never seem to last because I don't think that they are, what you find out is the most of them are not that great. And I don't know if podcasts work better because when you find one, you can just subscribe and then you can kind of count on it. It's more organized really is because at least then I know what the podcast is going to give me week to week. Twitter Space is very random. Now if we as podcasters ran a regular Twitter Space, it would be much different. But what are the platforms going to be there or not in a year? Meh, probably not. But Ray, they're just keeping it real. That's all. They are just keeping it real. They're keeping it real. When I was in Nashville, I was talking to somebody and I said, so tell me about your podcast. And he said, oh, we do it Rogan style. You know, just me and a couple of friends. Talking for two hours. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, that's not a thing. Like it is a thing. But I was like, you're like, are you interviewing celebrities like Joe is? Oh, well, then it's probably not going to work. I mean, what do you want to get out of it? Like it's going to work if you and your friends are having fun. So I joke about dudes in a comic book. It works if that is like your weekend activity stellar. But, you know, most people who start a show, they actually want people to hear it. And they want more people to hear it every week because why else are you talking to a microphone and putting it out in the world? John, you look like something. Yeah, I, yeah, I'm nodding a lot because I'm agreeing a lot. I think the problem with live for me is that it's, it's a time, it's like a time slice of exposure. So, you know, if I put a podcast out there that's up there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anyone may happen across it and, you know, they'll just know that looks interesting. I'll just keep that for a rainy day kind of thing. Or when I'm, you know, doing my, doing my combined harvester up and down the field or whatever I'm doing and, and they may like it. They may listen to it and they say, oh, this is really good. I'll give another episode a go of that. And before you know it, they hooked on it and they listened to every episode and so on. And you've got a, you've got a fan and a follower of the show. But with live, the problem is that you've got this little slice in time when you're actually making that content. And I mean, I know you can record it and post it later, but the attraction of live is to be there when it's live. So that what you can do is you can say, well, here are some comments like we have right now on this show coming in in real time. We can talk about it on the show, but that's a very narrow slice of time in a week. If you're not there for that narrow window, you miss out. And it's the problem with that is that in order to get more people to actually come on to that, they have to come on when it's happening. And I did actually stream pragmatic live at two different stages of the production of it. So back in 2014, I did it and I did it again in 2018. And it never really caught on because I could never find a time zone that suited everybody. There are a lot of US based listeners like the majority of my listeners are in the US, but I have a reasonable number from Europe and a reasonable number from Australia. So finding one time to do it is extremely difficult. So I felt like in the end, it wasn't worth the effort. So I kind of pulled the pin on live. And I asked recently the patrons, I put a survey and said, Hey guys, would you be interested in resurrecting live? And the answer was a unanimous no. So. Wow. Yeah. Plus it's a different skill. I know when I first started doing things on StreamYard, I was horrendous because I was, I could not stop like mid sentence. I'd be talking along and to be like, and really my favorite microphone is, Oh, look, Tina said this. And I was like, wait, what? I was just all over the place. So that has to come in. If you're taking, I have it set up where people can jump into StreamYard while I'm doing it live. You better have the skill and the courage and the courage to tell someone, Hey, thanks so much for showing up. We're glad you're here and kick them out. Because if you listen to any radio show, somebody would be like, man, I think the brown should trade Mayfield. He's an idiot. And that's, that's why. And then the host will say, yeah, he's, he didn't have a good year last year, blah, blah, blah. And then the guest will go, yeah, I think we should trade him. He's all like, they just keep repeating the same point. And that's where as the host, you have to realize, okay, this person has said all they like, whatever they were bringing to the table, they put it on the table and they don't want to leave. So you have to have the skill to go, Hey, thanks so much for calling Sparky. And next up we have whatever, but yeah, lives a whole other thing. So if you're the engineer and you're trying to do fun things like, oh, that wasn't good. You know, now you have a lot going on. So it's live is fun. I get maybe 3% of my audience. If I'm lucky, the shows up live. So that's the other thing. And then you have to make sure not to go. My favorite is when I listen to Joe Rogan watch YouTube. That's, that's the best audio ever. Cause he's like, Hey, Terry or whatever his, you know, co-host is put that up on the screen. Oh, look at that. Oh, did you see? Oh my God. This is fabulous audio. So that drives me nuts. Yeah. Ray, you have a comment. No. So Tiana says my favorite podcast records live. I love it because they bring questions and comments from the live chat. My input gets into the podcast each week. There you go, Tiana. You're in your input is put into this podcast. But there you go. It's because, you know, and we can do that. Right. Why does this show do live? Because it, the stream yard is a, um, it's a tool I use to connect remotely with people in Australia. Like quite honestly, it's easy. All right. Um, stream yard has made, I did, so I produce at work where I'm not on camera and I also use stream yard and it depends. Like I'll use Riverside for remote recording because you'll get the highest quality remote recording, but I use stream yard day in and day out for this style of round table type podcast, because I did it all from my phone. I produce from my phone. Everything you see me doing here, which actually I do a lot more, bringing banners and CTAs and all this stuff, stream yard makes it extremely easy and people can join. They don't have to be on Chrome. Like they can be on most devices, like just all these reasons, right? So it's the right tool for the right job. And for the round table, we do this and look, I'm talking to podcasters. So audio, right? The audio is mixed. Oh, however, and I don't have a premium stream yard because as you see that John's got the lovely stream yard duck today. Congrats, John. Skype headphones and all. You're the winner. But it's a mallard award for stream. We love you stream yard because you're free and you're still here. And which is Dave's, you know, not a good business model, but they have a premium and they'll split out. I haven't tried it yet. So I don't know about sync issues and all that non endorsement. Hashtag not sponsored all of that. But yeah, we do it because it's easy. And I, again, I talked to podcasters. The audio is good. I do some live mixing here in real time so that when that audio is done, actually record it on this side natively. So mine is a separate track from the guest, but the guests, they know how to do audio. Now most podcasts are not going to have this. I'm not going to have the luxury of bringing on people who have great mic setups and know how to be on microphone. So it works for this. But let's see. My favorite podcast here doesn't wait. She starts on time and there was another. Let's see. Tiana also said if you do it right, doing the live recording of your podcast can work really well. And I think doing it right, you know, Dave, you mentioned how a lot of it is not post produced, right? So a Twitter space might get recorded and then just, it just sits there as the same raw ugly audio that it was. And there is some element to, if you're live, you might be able to do that. You might be able to welcome people in and have a little bit of almost pre-show and post-show, but as a recorded show that you're going to publish, right? That should then be tightened up, so to say. So we do it because it's convenient and it works. Do I think this does well? We get, I don't know what we get. You know, any one of these can do, you know, 500 or 1,000 views on YouTube over time and the audio is going to do better. But again, we're back to that thing where we're being discovered. So it's a bonus, right? Live is also a super bonus. We do like feedback and we try to work that in when possible. But this is a, this is a hard core podcast round table listener is going to actually maybe come over once in a while, see what we look like and quickly run away back to the audio. Well, and I always wonder if it's just me. If you're listening to an audio podcast and it's good and the host is talking to you and it's a great content and then all of a sudden towards the end they go, hey, and don't forget, be sure to like, subscribe and smash the bell. There's a part of me that goes, oh, they're not talking to me. And I don't know if that's just a Dave thing. But for the whole time, I thought they were talking right to me like, oh, I've just been listening on a YouTube thing. Do you guys feel that way too? Or is that just a me thing? If you're saying it, clearly somebody's thanking you, right? Not just you. So which is important, right? Because again, when we're doing live, if I'm showing something like, oh, hey, check out this new microphone that I got, you better describe the microphone. You need to understand what you're doing and who your audience is, that you know you're going audio only at some point. Love your book back there, Dave. And if that's all I say, but like, what's the book? Like give me the time. Like what are you, what is he talking about, right? So don't make the audio only audience work for it or miss out on it. So yeah, I mean, if you were thinking something, again, what is like the teacher in class always said, you know, ask no stupid questions because if you have the question someone else does too. So your audience is also having those same thoughts. So if you have those thoughts, especially as a producer, that's important feedback that you just got from yourself to be conscious of in your own productions. There you go. Yeah, I think Dave, you raised an interesting point about it is a different technique when you're doing live and just thinking about that, as you were saying, and I'm like, well, maybe that's where I failed in my attempts is that I didn't draw in enough of the comments. I mean, I did, but I probably could have done a better job of it. So upon reflection as a few years ago, but the other point to just to reiterate is it has to be the right show for it because there are so many podcasts of so many different kinds. Some are heavily produced. Some are just chats amongst friends and so on and so forth. And shows like causality, for example, where I just record it solo. I mean, that's there's no point doing that live. You know, it's I'd like to say it's all done in one take. Okay, it's done in a take, but there's a lot of editing anyway. So it's like that's very different, whereas pragmatic was the only one for me that really fit. And even they didn't quite fit quite so well. So I think if you have the right kind of show that can incorporate that live content, you do it well, then there's probably a place for it. So maybe the key question to anyone who's producing a podcast is, is my podcast the right fit to even try live in the first place? And if it is, then have at it and see how it goes. I suppose. Yeah, that's usually important. I've done solo shows. This is the first show. I wouldn't actually that I was going to say I wouldn't do that with a solo show. I did that. That's the podcast or studio started off as the whole concept was a live streamed podcast Q&A type of format. And guess what? When you're new, no one's there asking you questions. No. So it's just me playing bad creative commons, DJ music, making up questions or having some friend bringing a question. It didn't work. I got that. Would it work better now? Sure. Still really hard as Dave probably knows with the, you know, his review podcast review show. You really have to plan for that kind of engagement, I think. And so, or, you know, build up a massive audience because again, such a small percentage is going to show up live. So it really does go to, yeah, I mean, I saw, I did see a solo podcast make, do like a live stream of a show. And it was very fascinating as a, like, as a, well, probably because I'm a person who produces podcasts to see the sausage being made. But that was a one off, right? You're like, am I going to tune into this every week? Probably not. Because it's a very good point to pay attention to, you know, does your format fit a live format? Yeah. I know I had one week where my co-host let me know, hey, we usually do 90 minutes. I can only stay an hour. I'm like, not a problem. And so we politely dismissed him at the appropriate time and I had 30 minutes and I'm thinking, not a problem. At that point, the chat room will be popping along. There's a lot of topics and it's doing live solo is very strange because you're kind of looking for your audience to be the co-host and chime in except there's what a 30 second delay on StreamYard. So there's this, it's just a weird getting any kind of momentum going and you're just begging. I was begging people to pop in and play co-host and it was just, it was one of the things I'm like, okay, note to self the next time Jim asked to leave early, we're shutting the show down like, hey, thanks so much for only doing 60 minutes this week. See you later bye. So. Effie says, I would say never in my life will I make time to listen to a live podcast in my schedule yet alas here I am for the third time as I pull my son up and down the buildings hallway. So shout out to Effie for being a power listener. She loves the round table. We love her. So thank you so much. But again, your hardcore audience may tune in. So it really is, why are you doing it? Right. And we do it as a, as it's because it's an easy way for us to record with remote people. You know, I always talk about production and, you know, people say, oh, do you send microphones to your guests? Not on this show. Other shows. And, you know, if you are doing a regular code, if it was just Dave and I showing up every week, I would expect different things of Dave. Now he already has those things, good audio and, you know, the video looks good. But when you have guests who are coming in for one time only, right? Yeah. This is what this platform really helps with because you have to lower the barriers to that entry as much as possible. Right. Obviously I'm going to make sure that they, you know, I'm going to ask, can you wear some headphones? Do you have a decent microphone and we walk them through what that is? But again, so this show, this live format, we're just lucky that there's a live button in addition to the record button and it just all works out. And we have, you know, we get to get the audience involved here. Because again, as I said at the top of the show, that's what this show is all about is like, give us your experience, right? At every level. So I think great point, John, about, you know, does your show sort of fit the format? And then is it too much work to add it? Really? And is it worth the payoff? Because it's, you know, there's no, I don't know how much payoff there is other than connecting with your audience, which, which is really cool. Like seeing people who listen is amazing because you don't see that when you're doing a podcast by yourself and you're not live and you're not somewhere where people are interacting with you. I mean, obviously if you get emails and stuff, but it feels different in real time, right? So if you want to connect with that, you know, with a portion of your audience, it's really good for that too. Yeah, that's good. It's kind of a middle ground. Like when I'm up on stage giving a presentation, I can see how many people are looking down at their phone and it can get depressing sometimes. You get the ones that are engaged and so on, you know, but, but this is somewhere in the middle, you know, so you can, you do get some time delayed feedback, but you know, that's some, yeah, anyway. So yes, the Australian guy, hi, my name is John Chiggy. Hello. So thank you. It's all good. We, you know, Blab was good for actually getting the audience into the stream, right? If you wanted to bring, hey caller, except the caller was on video most of the time. And if you were lucky, the caller didn't come in to just troll your stream and rip you. But yeah, I don't know. Hasn't Clubhouse and Twitter spaces are the two most recent sort of like, let's just turn this thing on and see what happens with a few of our friends. And so while I've wanted to get the content off of there, it's very difficult. And I think it's just the difference is production, right? And maybe it's, and it's even branding like a Twitter space is supposed to probably be pretty casual where I think Clubhouse Clubhouse felt like it was a little more organized that the mission was like to have a presentation, right? Whereas Twitter spaces feels like, hey, press this button and go live, which is, you know, like Instagram live, probably no different. It's like go live anytime. Let's do this. So I just, I'd like to see you turn off your audio. Maybe get to the point. It's all I'm saying. Or have a point. Have a point is very, yeah. Well, you know what? I mean, the ones that I tune into, that's how you got me. You got me. I mean, look, if you're a YouTuber, you learn very fast that if you do not deliver on the title, they're gone. And YouTube gives you, because they're a wall garden, they give you the analytics and you learn real fast or you don't. And then you don't get many views. But if you're a good Netflix, you learn real quickly that like, I have, if you got someone to click play, like you are 75% of the way there, like the thumbnail worked, the title worked. And then you opened up and here's what happens every time, every time. Blah, blah, blah, two minutes. Let's get right into it. They always say, let's get right into it. What are you talking about, dude? You just didn't get right into it. Can you see a pet peeve? So, hey, this is from a YouTuber to a YouTuber, get to the point really quickly. Here's another phrase, but before we get to that, and I always want to go, if you hear yourself saying that whatever comes after that phrase, better be really, really good stuff because your audience is like, hey, we're waiting for the stuff. And you're saying, oh, but before I get to that, I'm like, ugh. So, because there are times when I say that I'm like, oh, I'm breaking my own rule. All right. There's all these verbal triggers, and this goes for podcast too. When you start to say, well, that was pretty good conversation, or that's probably a good place to wrap up. And guess what you're planning to do after that sentence? Well, after about like five more sentences, you're planning to give all your calls action. Hey, sign up. They're gone. Like you can see it in your analytics. As soon as you have any kind of verbal cue that it is over, that line goes straight down, straight down on the graph. They are gone, man. People hit stop. They're going to do the Marvel thing where you have a little snippet after the credits to keep them there. And I have done that as a producer. But like, most people don't find out till later that they missed it. That's it. Yeah. You know what's amazing? We did not. Yes. The shortest round table ever. No. In fact, quite the opposite. This could end up being one of the longest because what have we done? We've done one story. I turned the intro into a whole other story, which is what we do here. But let's actually let me look. So we got one of John's stories. Dave, is yours more compelling? I mean, you know, we get this conversation about keeping the listeners here. It's more about if you're trying to get an advertiser. Tom Webster has a latest episode of I Hear Things. And in a nutshell, it used to be if you wanted to reach 50% of all of the podcast audience, you had to advertise on seven different networks to reach that without having any kind of overlap. When you say networks, what do you mean? Like the iHearts, like the, you know, actual, like, actual platforms. Those are platforms. Right. Platforms. That's a good, that's a better one. So, and he said they just redid that study. And now you only have to advertise on four platforms to reach to reach the entire quote on quote. 50%, 50% a week. Yeah. I thought originally it was 50% of weekly listeners. And the reason for that is a, all these platforms keep buying the really popular shows. And I think it was two weeks ago, he mentioned that most of the growth in podcasting is coming from the really popular shows that are getting people to, hey, you know, did you hear what so and so the celebrity said on this week's show kind of thing. And I just thought about it. I was like, well, that keeps going down. On one hand, I'm kind of worried about it because if you're not on a big network, how are you going to get advertising? So I understand that thought, but I also say, yeah, but they're also not pulling in super niche shows. They're bringing in celebrity shows and things like that. And I have a niche show. I do a podcast about podcasting and yet I can still get sponsors. Now, I don't have enough downloads to quit my day job and that whole nine yards, but I just thought it was interesting that the networks are getting bigger and the shows on the networks are getting more listeners. So if you're into advertising and you have a show that's everything for everybody, you know, you haven't nished down a bit, that might be a little, you know, a harder road to go down. If you're thinking, oh, I'm going to start a podcast and get advertising and it's like that's never really worked, you know, for 90% of podcasters, but based on that particular report, it's not going to get better. Apparently. Well, there's I mean, there's two things there, right? If you're an advertiser saying, should I get in a podcast? What are you advertising? Right? If you're advertising soda, you have to get across the mass audience, right? But if you're advertising, like, I don't know. I'm trying to think of something very niche, right? If you're advertising, what's that? Bell buckles. I don't know. Bell buckles, right? There's probably, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, I won't stereotype anyone, but there's, there's a lot of shows that you could probably get to and be more successful with your money. So, and as a podcaster who is looking for advertising, I think a lot of people would see that stat and be very disappointed, right? But look, most of you who listen to this, you're probably indie podcasters, which is like, I would categorize as sub 1000 to, I don't know, sub around the 1000 range listeners, right? Like, like real comeback every week type listeners. Those aren't the advertisements you want. You're not making money with that. Like, that's Google banner ads on your blog. It's intrusive to your audience for a few pennies. The advertisers you want is the bell buckle guy, right? Like who, you have a show about, you know, I don't know, country western wear or something and like, like 90% of your audience wears a bell buckle and, you know what I'm saying? It's like, there's an advertiser for you. That's not the one. You don't want the soda people. You want you want something that fits your audience. So like, I get it. What it says to me also too is like, if you listen to this show, I could probably pull up your podcast app and also find maybe like five other shows and one of them is a top 10 show, right? So that like, people who listen to podcasts also listen to like a show that gets a lot of reach because like you said, a lot of times that's people's entry point into podcasting, right? And then if they're lucky, they dive off and they find something very specific for them, right? And that was one of Tom's points. It's like, if, you know, these smaller shows want advertising and that in itself, there are some people like, I don't want ads. I'm just doing this for fun. But he was saying, if you want any kind of advertising in the future, you're going to have to learn how to work together and to me, networks, I am not sold on the concept of a network, but somehow you're going to have to tie yourself together to say, okay, I've got six shows. We all talk about the same thing. Mr. Neesh sponsor, you won't work with 2,000 downloads, but will you work with 10 now that I've got five shows? Kind of thing. So which I agree. I mean, obviously more downloads makes it much easier to get a sponsor. But a, I'm not sure everybody's sold on getting a sponsor and I don't know that's networks. I've just, I, I had a network this week where basically, well, I've said this before, Ernie and Bert start a podcast because they've known each other forever, you know, three years, three years later, they don't talk to each other. And, you know, it's Bert locked Ernie out of the account and deleted all the files. It's just not pretty. So be careful if you're going to, you know, team up with another podcast. It makes me think it makes me want to ask John this on who I think said has had a lot of podcasts or either run sort of a network like it started out that way, right? It started out where I had some other people that were signing up to reduce content as well. And they would get a split of the of the ad revenue back in 2015. But very quickly that I wanted to get engineers on the podcasts space. I wanted more engineers like genuine out there in the field mechanical process engineers, chemical processes and so on. Well, it turns out they're making a heck of a lot more money doing their day job. So it's a really, really sold on giving up their personal time to give away in essentially their knowledge for what it was a disproportionate amount of money. The ultimate conclusion was it wasn't worth it for them for their time. So it started out more as a network with that. And then over time it just ended up being me, which is why I keep every time I look at engineer network as a title. I stuck the brand. I start with a branding, reminds me a lot of 70 decibels back when it was all just Mike early kind of thing. And I feel much the same kind of way as Mike did at the time. So but so that that was an interesting experience. Again, a hard lesson. But for me, what I struggled with early on is I did have my pragmatic in 2014 was really taken off. I was getting sponsors really easily. I big, big name sponsors and so on. Well, I call them big name sponsors. But like my experience particularly with Squarespace they're cut off level. Their threshold is keep going up and up and up. So it started out at like 5,000 downloads in the third day period. And then six months, seven months later I went back and it was up to 25,000. And it's gone up again since then. So they won't even talk to you if you're like that if you're not above that minimum threshold. And a lot of the cost, a lot of the advertisers, you know that they want to know that their investments going to get a return. So they equate more downloads to more years and hence, you know, a better return. You watch your conversion rates and so on and so forth, which is fine because that's their business. They're advertising. They want to see a reaction, a response and a return on their investment, which I understand. But the part that was difficult for me to learn initially is that the difference between an advertiser and a sponsor. Whereas a sponsor is more interested in just brand recognition, getting their name out there. And they're not so concerned about getting massive return on it. But they tend to stand by you for longer and those sorts of sponsors are gold. And, you know, so I had a long running sponsor in many tricks and they continued to sponsor the show up until very recently where I kind of made a bit of a decision and nothing to do with any of the sponsors or advertisers. But I just decided that I was getting enough money from Patreon support as well as from Apple channel podcast subscription that I didn't really need to be bothering with sponsors. And so I kind of, I found that niche and I built that audience. But that took seven, eight years of continuing to create content. It didn't happen overnight. And that kind of led me down the road of, well, I guess there's different flavors of advertising and sponsors. And if you want to make money from your podcast, it's certainly in my niche anyway, is the niche method with premium supporters that want to just encourage you to keep making the content. But that was my experience anyway. Certainly your mileage may vary but. You sure it wasn't seven days or seven months? Seven years? I say that to everybody that's like the norm that I hear. And there are definitely cases like John's where it's longer. On occasion I'll run to people who are shorter. But I usually tell people three years, like minimum, if you're starting from zero, you know, if you've got somebody else, maybe not as long, but it takes a while. How do you like the iTunes subscription? You're the only person I know that's actually doing that. I was keyed in on that too, man. I was like, he's the first I've heard say anything about it. Okay. I did a couple of articles on my blog. I have another blog, techdistortion.com. And I did blog on my experiences. But just the summary, high level summary is I got on the platform and it took me a long time to get in when they first announced it. I imported the audio in a way that was not the way they intended it to be used. So I ended up having to install and start over once it was actually out because I couldn't be to test it. And so once I got a beta tested, it's just another destination. The things that I do like about it is that it makes it very easy for people to subscribe and support that way. But that's pretty much where it ends. I mean, it's an Apple interface so it's kind of nice and pretty and lovely and all that. And that's great. Not a negative, but the negatives for me are you have no idea who your listeners are. There's no way for them to really give you any feedback. You can't get in touch with them. But on a technical level, you have to upload a stereo wave file. I mean, I've been producing podcasts in 96-kilobit mono for forever, less than that in some cases, you know, for bandwidth constrained people. And having to upload an uncompressed wave in stereo, which is really just the same channel duplicated left and right. And of course, as a wave, you can't have embedded chapters. You can't have anything. And then they apply the DRM to it. And that can take hours. I've uploaded a wave file that was like 1.4 gig or something like that, which is not hard to do an hour-and-a-half show, right? Right. Yeah. And I hit refresh, refresh. It says processing audio. And I'm like, yeah. But like it's, that was, you're still going? Okay. How much? I don't even know how much compute resources they're throwing at this thing, but it can't be much. I don't, I don't anyway. So it's, it's been okay. I'm, I'm probably getting about 10 to 15% of my overall podcast income from that space. But that's taken a year to build up. And it took a while to get started. So yeah. Do you know what, and if you say, David, rather than I'd answer that, that's fine. Do you know what percentage of your total downloads has now gone to premium? That's a great question. I do not. No. For causalities, the only show I'm really tracking downloads on. And even that off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you. No, it's a good question. Sorry. I wish I did sign up. My guess is going to be 3%. Probably. Cause the, the, the one that still blows me away is I was listening to Radio Lab and Radio Lab has a gazillion people listening to it. I mean, this is great science show and the whole nine yards. And they did kind of a PBS thing where they're like, Hey, we're raising money. We've got to do this. And, you know, we have a big team and we're jetting all over the country to, to make these things for you. I mean, if you'd like to support the show, you know, you could for just, you know, $13 a month, you can feed a small child or whatever their pitch was. And they said, we're trying to get up to 1%. And I was like, wait a minute. This is a show that when you say Radio Lab, if you're in front of a listener, they're like, oh my God, I love that show. And they're trying to get up to 1%. And I was like, wow, that's, that's depressing. A lot of money though. I mean, there's two sides to it. It's like one percent of their audiences. Yeah, that's true. But why are they having so much trouble converting a rabid audience? Right. Right. It just, it just tells you it's really tough. Like these are these high threshold events that I'm telling you are really hard feedback, live, like premium very hard. Right. And you might not need much to convert, but if you're motivated by any of those, you're probably starting off in the wrong place. You have to be motivated by the content. You just have to. Creating daily said I was able to get 10,000 K sponsored with 400 total downloads on my saltwater fishing show. Got a frame the sales pitch correctly quality over quantity works with big and small brands. And so, you know, my only question is did that deliver? Right. Like there's also the scary thing of over, you know, of pitching. And then the advertisers like we didn't get any conversions. We're gone. Right. So you got a lot of money one time and he probably did. I mean, this is a saltwater fishing show. Right. Very targeted. Right. If you're selling saltwater fishing boats. One sale. And that that had that advertisers very happy. Right. I'm coming back. Right. If you're selling rods, some of those are very expensive, but maybe you have to sell a lot more. Right. So it all goes back. We keep talking about like what's the fit for your audience? What's the style of your show? Like it's all a personalized fit. And so, you know, if you will need a personalized fit here, if you want to get links in real time, this is the shout out I do to tune into the live and the video before I start saying this is the end, I'm putting it right here. Dave puts links to all this great stuff, even stuff links that you might not get when you go to the show notes at podcasher roundtable.com. Dave puts them in the chat. I mean, this is what co-hosts do for you. That's a whole other question. Host, co-host, we won't go in that. We'll save that. We've done that before, but we're going to go in podcasherroundtable.com slash live. Check us out. They signed, let's see, creating says, yeah, they signed 52 weeks this year. So, hey, right, right advertiser, right audience. Yeah, it works. So we'll have to get creating daily here, which is that. You know what? That must be the YouTube channel. I don't know. podcasherroundtable.com slash guest, create daily. Yeah, come on. We'll talk to you. I mean, generally, we do like you to have a podcast, but it sounds like you do have one. I assume that's not just like a YouTube show. Maybe you're calling that a podcast. Ooh, that's fun stuff because we deal with that too. So definitely sign up and that obviously, it obviously applies to everyone who's listening. Do we want to hit that that last story? Can we do it? Look, if you're if you're live, you're free to go. This is the rule of what's the conference, Dave, where the rule was. Oh, we're a network camp. A pod camp. A pod camp, which was the rule was like, you can vote with your feet and leave. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, because I'll tell you what, as a presenter, it's weird to get someone to see John. You talk about presenting. Someone gets up and leaves in the middle of your middle of your talk. It feels very much like a vote of confidence in your presentation. But when you go into it understanding, hey, I just want to check in and don't be offended. So the presenter knows the audience knows because in December, I'm like, I want to stay because I don't want them to feel like that. Right. So apparently I'm too sensitive. But so if you're live, bail out, we're going to we're going to attack this one story. We went from shortest to longest roundtable ever. Let's do this. That's John's story. What do we got? Okay. So this is also sort of about the whole Spotify situation. And I find it interesting. I have a point of personal interest with with audio books and particularly this one. So this is Spotify's purchase is, you know, is that they've acquired a findaway voices and findaway voices is an audio book production platform service. What do you want to call it? So if you want to create an audio book, you go to them and you say, you know, who have you got and look at the rates, listen to do an audition. And then, you know, as an audio book producer, then I can like record that and so on. And they handle all the payments and all that sort of stuff. But then it goes out to any pretty much every platform you can imagine. So whether that's audible, Apple books, I forget what they call it now. I think it is just books. But in any case, it goes out to the Kindle store, all that. And honestly, because I've done two audio books via that service. So my ears sort of pricked up when Spotify bought them. And I'm like, OK, so it's it's a clear part of their play that an audio book is a very highly produced podcast of a certain kind of podcast, I should say. It's kind of funny because I was thinking about this the other day with causality because causality is heavily scripted, but it's not a book. I could turn it into a book and then call it an audio book if I wanted to rather than a podcast. But the line is very different. But of course, you know, then you've also got nonfiction books and fiction books and, you know, someone reading Harry Potter is very different from me doing it sort of causality. But anyway, so what I found interesting about this was because Spotify is just is just taking the next slice and the next slice and the next slice. If it's audio, they want to play in that space. And I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing in the long term because I mean my experience with Fine Away was great because you could get on any platform. But are they going to start locking that down and say, no, now Spotify exclusive kind of, you know, that's my concern in the longer term. And I definitely think that's a valid concern because everything I've seen from Spotify is we're buying all these tools and, you know, I feel like I'm at a Pink Floyd concert. They're just putting up another brick in the wall and they're building it up to where eventually it's like, well, I mean, I just in Nashville, I was at this thing called the Lord Hotel and it was literally like five hotels that they just stitched together. They're like seven different restaurants and at the whole point of it is you don't have to leave. You can just stay here and keep spending your money right here. I mean, they had a boat ride in the middle of the hotel. I mean, it was huge. And I think that's what Spotify is looking for. They want to have a boat ride in the middle of their app. It's so big and I mean, I don't blame them. I just I'm with what John is saying it's like, wait, I like this service before because it did this and then it got acquired and now, oh, it doesn't do what it used to do and, you know, which just means somebody else has to step into that spot where they were and say, hey, remember those guys how they used to do this? We do that now. So it'll be interesting to watch. I haven't actually seen Spotify push on the actual it's only just happened recently in the last few months. So it's one of those watch this space and right now they haven't pulled the pin on other phones. It's business as usual. But of course, that's tends to be the way these things go is I'll do BAU for the next, you know, six months, 12 months and then suddenly the hammer falls and it's like, yeah, you know how we used to go to output to Apple books store? Not anymore. Sorry, go somewhere else kind of thing. So we'll wait and see. But I'm yeah, yeah, I think you share my concern with that day. So yeah. Well, and also, does that mean I'm going to have to listen to your book in Spotify because I have a whole library in audible and I've got my, you know, again, I've got my favorite audio book app, you know, be interested to see how they do that and should be interesting. Yeah. Well, they tried to move YouTube viewers over to Spotify. I don't know that that worked out very well, right? I mean, podcast listeners a little easier, right? Even though like, oh, not going to have two apps, right? I mean, it's not it's not easy, but it must be nice to have a ton of money to sort of throw at the wall. Let's see what sticks because I think that's like Google who tries a lot of things that we like, but not enough people like them or not enough people use them. They might like them and then they go away. And there's always that slightly cynical voice in my head being an old musician that I go, yeah, don't forget that, you know, behind the scenes, a lot of people that are pulling the strings are, you know, record labels and such that have worked to deal with Spotify and I'm like, record labels not really known for treating their customers or fellow employees. If you want to call a musician an employee, I'm like, so I hate to, I don't know, judge the how's that go? Judge the child by the parent or whatever. But I'm like, we'll see how this works out. So awesome. Well, you know, I didn't do the thing where I, you said earlier where I should have asked the guest. Can you stay a little longer? I said, I excuse the audience, everyone, you can go. But I kept John here, you know, his morning is he's just started his morning. He's probably has like a whole list of things to do. Dave and I are like, Dave's definitely in the night. I'm winding down to the end of the night. But so I want to say thank you, John, for hanging out with us a little extra longer. And, you know, that's a good sign when we go long, it just meant that, you know, you did a really good job and we enjoy the conversation. So once around table or always around table, we'll have you back on any time. Why don't you let us know where we can find, I guess, one podcast or, you know, or all your stuff. Yeah, I have the one website that takes it all the things, which I assume you do too. So thanks again. Yeah, well, no worries. Thanks for having me. It's been fantastic. People are looking for my work on the engineered network. It's at engineered.network. Just go to that full network, not like.net. Some people get that. But yeah, so engineered.network and you'll find all the shows that I make the ones I make most regularly are causality and pragmatic. And if you're into Twitter, I'm also at John Chiggy on Twitter and if you're into the Thetaverse, it's at chiggy at engineered.space. Awesome. We'll link it up in the show notes podcast around table.com. Do you have engineered.net? I doubt it because that's probably crazy. Yeah. Yeah, that was that was. No, no. Yeah. Because it's always that trick, right? You're like the thing that people tend to do sometimes it's good to have them, but it is hard to do that in the domain space because Dave owns them all. I mean, you probably buy it. I do own a few. Yes. He has quite a problem there. They're on the bookshelf. I can see him. I see all your domain, Dave. They're hanging out. Put those away, buddy. It's not a flex. Awesome. Well, hey, Dave Jackson co-host. Thanks for coming back. Yeah, always fun. Ray said this earlier. It's always, you know, at the end of these, you always like, oh, that's why we do this. This was a lot of fun. It's always great hanging out. Thanks to the chat room. You can find me Dave Jackson's school of podcasting.com. Yes, Dan. Better late than never. Dan Powers in the chat showing up at the end. You know, the beauty is that we are time shifted. So and I am recording this unlike Twitter spaces that sometimes don't get recorded, which just feels very, it's either incompetence or they just, they're just messing with the idea. Right. Guess what? I'm not, you made me mad. I'm not showing up the next one. So, all right. But Dan will still be here so you can listen to the whole thing. All right, everyone. Thank you so much. Podcasts around table.com slash guest sign up appear on the round table or just, you know, find us on YouTube. Podcasts around table.com YouTube.com slash podcast around table. I probably indicated that we were stopping so no one's hearing that if, if they're gone. So it's okay. I could probably We've lost them already. I could probably say a lot of things right now that no one will ever hear. But thank you. If you're here, you are the power listener and we appreciate you. Wave. Goodbye. Bye. Bye.